A Minor Win For The Grammar Bandit

My friend turned me into a Meme because she's
basically awesome.

I'm always amazed when walking down any street with shops on to see how many grammatical errors I encounter-and the number is always remarkably high.What I don't understand is this-how on earth can so many people get so many things wrong? It's not like we haven't been taught it-we were! At primary school at the very least, and they were probably reiterated to us many times throughout our lives, so how difficult can it be? If you have a spelling or grammar error in a sign in the window of your shop-or worse, in the shop sign itself-it speaks to me of laziness and lack of respect for your business. It just doesn't feel very professional to me, is all. I mean these days it's not even really that hard to check with spell checkers and wiggly green lines and ALL OF THE INTERNET at your disposal, so it just comes across as laziness or stupidity on the part of the sign writer. I know I'm probably opening myself up as an easy target here, because I'm sure my blogs are full of sloppy grammar, and I know I have a bad habit of over using exclamation marks, but I'm really talking about the simple things that everyone should know, not just those who studied English at higher levels.
The worst offenders by far are apostrophes-people just don't seem to know what to do with them at all! I've lost count of the amount of times I've seen shops offering "tea's and coffee's" or "CD's", and there's even a tattoo parlour near me that proudly declares that they do "Tattoo's"-above the entrance to the shop no less.

This was stolen from Google Earth so it's a bit smushed
together but you can still see the offending apostrophe!

Would you trust someone to ink something permanently into your skin when they can't even get the sign for their own shop correct? No thank you!

Another one I see knocking around a lot is 'smile, your on CCTV' types-and that makes me twitch just to even type it. I'm not really sure where the confusion lies between 'you're' being short for 'you are' and 'your' meaning belonging to you but apparently it's there. Or possibly their, to some people. (Twitch.)

I used to be quite the stickler for it-was constantly correcting people's grammar on Facebook or Bebo (ha!) and the like-and it's something that makes people really mad! There have been numerous times when I've felt bad for correcting someone when they reply with "DYSLEXIC!" shouted back at me, or just had someone get angry with me for correcting them on their own status etc.. (Not, as it happens, ect, which means something rather different!). I've since relented a little-on your Facebook, in text messages etc. you can use whatever grammar you like and for the most part I won't call you up on it, unless you're someone who I know won't mind or should know better. In conversation too-I don't think you should pick on that because everyone has their own way of speaking full of their own colloquialisms and idioms and you shouldn't interfere with that unless you have been explicitly paid to do so. But if you use terrible grammar or make spelling mistakes on your company's website, in a sign on or around your shop, in formal correspondence or any other setting where you're supposed to be showing a professional front-I will judge you. My big mental red pen will come out and I'll start correcting things, if only in my head. Although I did once point out a spelling error in a presentation given to me at a job interview! I will also try to avoid using your business where I can, because I feel like if you can't take the time to get that basic thing correct, what other, more important things are you getting wrong or not noticing?

There is a happy ending to my tale, however, albeit only a small one. The other day I was walking through a shopping centre that had otherwise blank walls decorated with artwork by local children/artists and a short description beside them. As we walked past one of these, my speed reading eyes processed the fact that there was a horrible mashing together of sentences that weren't properly punctuated, and I exclaimed as much to my friend. What I hadn't realised though is that the sign painters were still nearby, and overheard me. One of them asked me to point out the mistake to him so that he could correct it for me. I think what I actually said was
"It needs a comma or something. I mean ideally it needs a full stop but you don't have a capital letter so you can't do that. A semi-colon would be best actually, but if nothing else, it needs a comma!"
He told me he didn't think there would be room for a semi-colon but he'd make sure something got sorted out for me and I went on my merry way.
To my surprise, when I walked past the other day and look there was a semi-colon. My semi-colon! I mean it's still a horrible sentence and would be better off being re-written entirely, but it's much better than it was!

I'm taking that one as one small victory for the Grammar Bandit, though there's still quite a way to go!

*hoists big red pen onto shoulder and walks off into sunset, cape flapping majestically in the breeze*

-Jenni-

Nothing Else But Words

Can you tell I favour a particular brand at all?

I was tidying my desk the other day (I know-shocking!) and as I was doing so I kept finding notebook after notebook. Some of them are full, some of them are nearly empty, and most of them are in varying states somewhere in the middle. And the thing is I can't throw them away, even the full ones, because they're full of wonderfully personal things that were pertinent to my life at some point, even if they are no longer.I just can't bring myself to casually throw out my thoughts, my words, that I've crafted into something with love and emotion and care-it feels a bit wrong to just chuck them in the bin.

Those notebooks are more like diaries to me, I suppose-if you flicked through any one of them you'd see a slice of my life at the time-a blog post, a poem, a half drafted letter, a to do list. I've never really been any good at keeping a proper diary-finding time at the end of every day to write about what I did always seemed tedious and boring to me, and more often than not the entries ended up dull and uninteresting. Between the pages of these notebooks, though, are little slivers of my feelings trapped on a page forever. If a total stranger happened upon them and read through some of them, they'd get a real impression of me, as if they'd just opened up my head and peered inside.

I've fallen into the habit of taking a notebook and pen everywhere I go so that I can write stuff down if inspiration strikes me-because too many times I have either had to buy one afresh or lost the idea completely without one. Another lives next to my bed so that I don't have to go too far to write down those weird-and-yet-completely-amazing flashes of inspiration your brain gives you whilst you are trying to fall asleep. I've always been some sort of 'writer'-whether that be stories that get started and never finished, angsty poems during my teens, letters to people that (more often than not) never got sent, and more recently blog posts which for the most part make their way on here in one form or another. I actually find it's a really good way to collect my thoughts-write things as if I was writing them to be read, even if I have no intention of that ever being the case. I just don't feel like I can throw these pieces of myself away-I've still got (somewhere) a notebook full of heartbroken letters that I wrote to my very first boyfriend almost 8 years ago, which I don't think anyone's ever clapped eyes on but myself. Even now, in this very notebook that I am writing this blog post in, there are things that I've never shared with anyone, pieces that will probably never become actual posts because they expose me rather too much, emotionally, and I'd always rather say too little than too much. It's not necessarily that I don't want people to read them, but I'm not offering them up for public scrutiny, let's put it that way.

I think it's basically that, for me at least, these notebooks are little pieces of myself, memories pressed between the pages as if they were pretty autumn leaves-and when I flick through the older ones I can still feel a sense of those feelings that are trapped there in black and white. I'm quite sure that I will end up with a shelf full of old notebooks when I am older, dusty from under-use and yellowing with age. But I will I throw them out even then? Not a chance. These pages hold my words, my thoughts, my mind and sometimes my heart. How could I get rid of that?

-Jenni-

The title is taken from this quote, attributed to John Locke: "So difficult it is to show the various meanings and imperfections of words when we have nothing else but words to do it with."

Letters to Mr. Nobody

[Source-Muffet on Flickr]

When I was with my first boyfriend, I developed a (bad) habit of writing him letters telling him all the things I couldn't bring myself to say to him because I was scared of the consequences (namely that I couldn't bear the thought that he might break up with me...again). I'd pour my heart out into those letters, smudging the ink with my tears (disadvantage of using fountain pens, right there) and telling him all the reasons he was making me unhappy and then...I'd never send them. I probably still have those notebooks full of my misery, full of letters that were never read by the person whose name they bore-he probably doesn't even know now how much I cried over him, over a relationship which I can now see (ah hindsight!) was already doomed to fail. Not even the strongest of bonds between people could be maintained with that wealth of unsaid words between them, and ours was certainly not what you would call a strong bond!

Why did I write the letters if I was never going to send them, I hear you ask? (I do, honest...) I guess I thought that if I could just get the feelings out onto paper, to feel the pain and cry the tears then I wouldn't feel them any more, that they wouldn't affect me when I was with him, that they wouldn't matter. Of course, that's nonsense-feelings don't go away because you took them out of your head and wrote them down, they still persist if you never speak to the appropriate person about them, unless you tell them that they're making you unhappy.

I tried harder with BoyfriendII to actually talk about stuff that was upsetting me, and for the most part it seemed to work much better-we had more arguments than me and BFI but felt like we tried to resolve them instead of pretending we didn't have problems and that our relationship was perfect. I stopped writing my feelings down as often, and when I did I showed him them-so we could discuss it and try to work through it. I felt like this was the much more mature and rational response to having a problem than just trying to hide it away from everyone and I guess it was really-airing grievances and all that, rather than leaving them to fester away in a drawer somewhere, niggling away at the back of my mind. Every sensible Discworld fan knows that words have powers of their own.

[Source-Open Clip Art Library]

I thought I'd left my letter writing habit behind me, more or less, but I recently seem to have fallen back into old habits. It's just easier to confess things to a reassuringly blank page than to tell someone something that might change the way they see you, or lead to judgement and condemnation. It's not just letters now, it seems, but blog posts too-I write them and never publish them for fear of revealing too much of myself and then never being able to go back to a point where it's not been read. I've got a letter full of emotions just itching to be sent, but I don't think I'll do it. I don't know if I can, or even if I should. I'm too hung up on the idea that telling people how I really feel just gives me nothing more than a million reasons to end up regretting it. I can't dissuade myself that revealing my emotions means that something will hurt me more than the contents of the letter ever would, that will make me wish I'd kept it safely tucked away in the dark with the rest of them.
Realistically I know that it's just a letter. A letter with some feelings in. Its something that by its very nature should be shared, should be read, a story that isn't told until seen with different eyes. Realistically I know that it won't make my world end, and that I really should just post the damn thing, if only as a way to get over the silly idea that the way someone reacts to something I have to tell them will just end up hurting me more, to get past the idea that feelings sometimes should be hoarded more closely than a dragon and its treasure.
Realistically, I know all this. Emotionally/Sub-consciously though? I'm not so sure.

What do you reckon?

-Jenni-

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Five Minute Fridays

In my insomniac madness the other night when I was searching the corners of the internet for solace in the blog of a stranger or two I happened upon something wonderful-the Five Minute Friday project. Described (rather accurately) as a 'writing flash mob' by the person who came up with the idea, the challenge is to write for 5 minutes only, unedited, unscripted, inspired only by a prompt word posted at midnight on Friday mornings (which is unfortunately 5AM for us Brits!), simply for the joy of writing. Then everyone who's participated link all their efforts to a post and take the time to read and comment on at least one other person's. I think it's lovely-it really unites people in blogging together regardless of the wildly different topics their blogs may normally be on, and there's so many different and interesting posts all inspired by a single word. Some are fictional, some are true to life and some are beautiful, and this is something I want to get involved with. I'm not going to stay up until 5AM every Friday morning so I can do it live with the other participants but I am going to try and devote five minutes of my life every Friday to writing 200 words or so. I'll post some of them, not others, depending on what the prompt is and the post that results from it.

This week, for example, the prompt word is 'Bare'. I've read a few-there's a lot of religious posts about laying yourself bare before God etc etc, there's some about the bare trees of winter, some just about feeling bare without a certain person/object in their lives. Me? I wrote 215 words about being naked, in my usual uncompromisingly honest way. I wonder what they're going to make of me? I definitely don't fit into this community made of mothers and religious folk, I am neither of those things and I am unlikely to ever be. I've read a lot of the 'Bare' entries and not read a single swear word yet-I can only imagine that my posts are going to be heavily disapproved of. But I still want to do it, more because I really like the idea than anything else, it's fresh and it's different and a tiny bit wonderful. Whether my posts go down like a lead balloon or are enjoyed with the humour they're intended to have, it's going to be interesting, that's for sure.

-Jenni-

NB If you want to take part in Five Minute Fridays then all the details are here: http://lisajobaker.com/five-minute-friday/
The prompts are updated every Friday morning at 12:01 EST/5:01 GMT but the link stays open for the whole week, so you can complete it at any time. If you do, send me a link, I'd love to read your take on it. 

NaNoWriMo Has Arrived...

Source: NaNoWriMo

This is a short blog to tell you that I probably won't be blogging all that much this month. Why? Because I made the (probably very unwise) decision to take part in NaNoWriMo this year whilst suffering from a persistent yet creative bout of insomnia a couple of weeks ago. The challenge is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days-it doesn't have to be the best quality novel in the world, it doesn't have to be edited as you go along, it's just trying to physically get words on the page and all the rest comes afterwards. After the first day, I have to say I'm looking forward to it, although I have only written 1546 words so far! There's a long way to go yet. I guess the reason I wanted to do it was because I've always been slightly in awe of those of my friends who casually go "Yeah, I've written a novel or two." I think it's really really cool. And then I realised that I could totally be one of those people with a novel or two on my computer, that other people thought were cool and all I had to do was take part in something that runs for a month-easy! (Ha Ha). Also I start writing stories a lot, I have a brilliant idea and I write the first chapter and then...nothing. I have never finished a single story I've started writing in my life, and sometimes I just feel the ideas deserve a little more than 500 words written in a train station*. If I want to finish on time (by the end of November) then I have to write another 1615 words each day-400 words longer than my longest blog post (so far) so I'm not going to have much imagination going spare for thinking of witty and amusing blogs. (They totes are...right? Oh who am I kidding, I just rant about shit =p)
In other news, I also got offered a job yesterday as an usher at the Playhouse Theatre in Nottingham (an excellent thing!) which puts more constraints on my time as well as NaNo leaving me less time than I would like for my dearest blog. But I'll be back eventually.
 If you are interested in following my NaNo progress then check out that little widget on the left hand side, and if you are interested in joining in then there's still time to register and get started and you're only a day behind! Just go to http://www.nanowrimo.org and sign up. Good luck!
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Anyway, I am off to write my next chapter or two, tata!

-Jenni-

*happens a little too often to me.